Charles B. Morrey, Jr.

Charles Bradfield Morrey Jr. ( born July 23, 1907 in Columbus, Ohio; † 29 April 1984) was an American mathematician who worked on the calculus of variations and partial differential equations.

Life and work

Charles Morrey came from a family of academics - his father was a professor of bacteriology in Columbus and his mother head of a music school. He studied at Ohio State University (Bachelor in 1927, Master 1928) and in 1931 at Harvard University under George David Birkhoff doctorate ( invariant function of Conservative Surface Transformations). 1929 to 1931 he was instructor at Harvard 1931/32 National Research Council Fellow at Princeton and 1932/33, at the Rice Institute. In 1933 he was Instructor in 1935 Assistant Professor, Associate Professor in 1938 and 1945, Professor at the University of Berkeley, where he was from 1949 to 1954 chairman of the mathematics department. In 1973 he retired. During the Second World War when the Ballistic Research Center Aberdeen Proving Ground was the U.S. Army.

Morrey worked on the theory of surface dimensions ( he dissolved in 1935 an issue of Karl Menger on the characterization of surfaces with finite Lebesgue measure ), elliptic partial differential equations and calculus of variations, where his work on the variation of multidimensional integrals to solve the 19th and 20 Hilbert problems contributing. He also developed the now - Sobolev spaces mentioned function spaces. He also dealt with the Plateau problem and minimal surfaces. In 1958, he solved the problem of analytic embedding real - analytic manifolds in Euclidean space. Influential was his work from 1938 through quasi- linear elliptic partial differential equations .. He also dealt with the variation of harmonic integrals ( by Hodge ) and the analyticity of solutions of elliptic partial differential equations.

In mathematical physics, he wrote a work on the derivation of hydrodynamic equations from statistical mechanics ..

Morrey is a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1962. 1967/68 he was president of the American Mathematical Society ( AMS). In 1964 he was Colloquium Lecturer of the AMS. He was a delegate to the United States at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1966 in Moscow. In 1970 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice ( differentiability theorems for nonlinear elliptic equations ).

He was married and had three children.

Writings

  • Multiple integral problems in the calculus of variations and related topics, University of California Press 1943
  • Multiple integrals in the calculus of variations, Springer 1966
  • Second order elliptic systems of differential equations, Princeton, Annals of Mathematical Studies, 1954, p.101
  • University Calculus
  • With Murray H.Protter: Modern Mathematical Analysis, Addison -Wesley 1964
  • With Murray Protter: A first course in real analysis, 2nd edition, Springer 1991
  • Morrey "Some recent developments in the theory of partial differential equations", Bulletin AMS 1962
Columbus (Ohio) April 29 Rice University Plateau's problem Integrated Authority File
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